Starchy Grant on Barkley 2016, and the record nobody sets on purpose

The year the race handed out a record that came with no prize and no obvious way to be pleased about it.

The Barkley Marathons produces a small number of finishers and a very large number of stories, and the 2016 edition was heavier on the second than the first. This episode was recorded within days of the race with Starchy Grant, who came away from Frozen Head with an entry in the record books that he had not been aiming for.

Getting lost, at length

The bulk of the conversation is a straight account of the loop: the terrain, the maps, the compass work, the books, and the hours spent in the wrong part of the park. Barkley navigation is not a matter of following a trail — much of the course is not on trail at all — and the difference between a good bearing and a bad one compounds over a ten-hour loop until you are somewhere the course does not go.

The record in question came out of that. It is the kind of mark the race specialises in: technically an achievement, arrived at through a sequence of decisions nobody would repeat, and funny only in retrospect.

What he would do differently

Asked what changes if he gets in again — Barkley entry being its own opaque process — the answer is mostly about time discipline rather than fitness. Runners who fail at Barkley rarely fail because they are not fit enough. They fail because the loop takes longer than planned, the cutoff arrives, and there is no version of the course where you make time back.

Not asking too much

The interview deliberately stops short on some details. There is a convention around Barkley that participants do not describe the course precisely enough to help anyone else, and the episode respects it. That reticence is part of why the race has kept its character while everything around it has been mapped, filmed and monetised.

Where it sits

Grant’s own route into running gets a stretch at the start, and it is the least likely part of the episode — an accidental discovery that he could run, followed by a steady drift toward the least reasonable end of the sport. Barkley recruits almost entirely from that population.